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In this article, Averie talks about The Atlas Six and the superiority complex of dark academia literature.
The Atlas Six: Book Review
The Atlas Six: Book Review
By Averie Black
By Averie Black
*Content Warning* This article contains major spoilers for The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, as well as mentions of murder, suicide, and sexual assault.
*Content Warning* This article contains major spoilers for The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake, as well as mentions of murder, suicide, and sexual assault.
For a while, one of the Booktok community’s spotlight books was The Atlas Six. In fact, TikTok is the sole reason the book took off and the author, Olivie Blake, who had originally self-published, was then traditionally published with Tor. This was a huge accomplishment and shed some light on self-published novels. Unfortunately, the book was extremely disappointing.
The Atlas Six is about six young adults with magical abilities who were chosen to join a secret academic society. The society has been around since ancient times, when the Library of Alexandria was thought to have burned down, but it did not actually burn down. Instead, the academic elites took all of that secret knowledge and made it only accessible to special recruits. However, the recruits are only in the beginning stages of initiation and must first go through a series of tests and research to become official members and have full access to the library's knowledge. The twist is that, although six of them were invited, only five of them will be emitted. Obviously, this is a super cool concept that gave a lot of readers The Atlas Six itch.
Image of the Library of Alexandria by Wiki Commons
At first, The Atlas Six gave off mad Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library vibes, which were welcomed with open arms but, sadly, it is not nearly as iconic as the other books. The main downfall of this concept was the characters. Libby, Tristan, Callum, Nico, Reina, and Parisa were the main six, with the side characters being Dalton, an assistant type; Atlas, who is like the leader; and Ezra, Libby’s boyfriend, who does not become important until later. They were all so insufferable. First on the chopping block are Libby and Nico, who are going to be talked about together since the book ruthlessly shoves their relationship dynamics down readers' throats every five seconds. They are academic rivals who just graduated from this magical college but are for some reason destined to always be separate forces pulled together by the gravitational force of the universe or something melodramatic like that. Just to start with something positive, it is nice to see that Libby and Nico are not love interests. Usually, whenever a boy and a girl are grouped together or have an academic rivalry, they are going to have a romance arc. However, Nico is clearly interested in his roommate, Gideon, and Libby has a boyfriend, who she cheats on with Parisa and Tristian. Sometimes, their banter is also fun, but the majority of the time it is just hard to read. The only enemies to lovers couple who are allowed to call each other by their last names are Amy Santiago and Jake Peralta.
Image of the Yin and Yang symbol by Vectorportal
Libby and Nico’s relationship is okay, but it could be much better. They start off with hating each other and end with begrudgingly working together. This series is a duology, so perhaps they have more growth in the second book, but if an author starts a character arc in book one, then it should finish in book one. Of course, the author would want her audience to read the sequel, but a book should be good as a stand-alone, no matter what comes after it. The draw of a second book when it comes to characters should be to expand on them, not to become a continuation of the same arc as the last book. It will just become redundant and frustrating for the audience to read 600 pages of Libby and Nico fixing their relationship, which has the same issues from page one. Libby is the super smart, anxious one while Nico is the super smart, cocky one. It is understandable how their personalities would clash, but Libby is not super anxious around Nico. In fact, their banter is pretty much identical to the conversations between Gideon and Nico. The only difference is Nico’s attraction to Gideon and not Libby. There were some interesting ideas around them, like the fact that they have similar powers, so it is more likely that one of them would be kicked out of the group than the others, or how the others view them as a package deal-- like one would be useless without the other. Their relationship and their individual personalities just did not really land.
Parisa is basically just a femme fatale. She even thinks, “Dalton was looking for ways to make her the villain of his femme fatale narrative...” so Parisa is aware of the stereotype. Unfortunately, acknowledging that the character is a femme fatale does not excuse her from being a femme fatale. Parisa is described to have other-worldly beauty and her magical ability is telepathy. With these qualities, she seduces more guarded people into sleeping with her so that they open up and she can easily read their minds. The best example of her doing this is when she sleeps with Dalton. Their teacher. Although they are both consenting adults, it is still very uncomfortable. At this point, everyone is tired of these kinds of characters. The world does not need any more fictional women to be described as beautiful as a goddess and to have seduction as the source of their power. It is basic, it is boring, and it paints women in a bad light. Parisa is also just a bad person. She wanted to manipulate a relationship between Tristian and Libby, so what did she do? She got all three of them very drunk while Libby was in an emotionally unstable place and they all had intercourse. Parisa then left before the other two woke up so they could have an uncomfortable interaction in the morning. Not only is that teetering the line of consensuality, but is extremely manipulative.
The next paragraph would be about Tristain, but he literally has no personality traits, so it will be about the psychopath Callum instead. He made Parisa commit suicide. That is it. That should be all it takes to convince someone that he is a freak. Callum is literally the Joker. He is constantly talking about how people work and how he is actually the most intelligent person ever and everyone else is below him. Using his persuasive powers, he then makes Parisa jump off the balcony. Luckily, this happened in another field of reality or something, so Parisa did not actually die. Callum meanwhile absolutely thought it was real, along with everyone else who watched the entire scene play out. He also had this really creepy relationship with Tristan where it seems like he has a crush on him, but he is the worst person to ever exist, so he's manipulating him the entire time. Nobody in the house liked him except Tristain, and Tristan nearly murdered him, so the bar is low. Despite all of this, there are still TikTok girlies saying he is their favorite! This is not even a Loki situation where it is a morally gray villain character. Callum is awful and nothing about his morality is gray. He sucks.
Image of a Psychopath by The Blue Dimond Gallery
Reina was completely ignored. One of the draws of this book is the switching POVs, but she really only has like three short chapters, and since she is pretty closed off and does not care about stuff like alliances, she does not appear often in the other characters POVs. The fact that she hardly talks makes her the best character in the book. She is the only person who feels somewhat like a real person. Other than Libby, she is the most well-written. It is interesting to see a character who does not care about power or getting into the secret group. Reina is just a chill person doing her own thing and, in a book full of egomaniacs, she is a breath of fresh air. Reina just really likes old literature so, while everyone else is busy fighting, she is in the library reading the original Odyssey in Greek. The only connection we see Reina form is with Nico. Every morning, they spar together while Nico talks at her, and then they go their separate ways. Oh, she also has cool plant powers so, overall, Reina is the best.
Image of a Dramatic Woman by Substack
The Atlas Six is, like, super dramatic and has the tone of a book taking itself and its themes way too seriously, so sentences like, “Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity-- that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn't feel that way right now” are all too common. Look, there are some really good quotes in The Atlas Six, but there are some good quotes in every book. The problem is that the writing style becomes a problem because the book is nearly 400 pages. It has a very clear tone but, when that level of intensity is throughout the entire novel, there is no place for the tone to go when there are higher intensity or serious moments. If this melodramatic tone is going 100% the entire time then, when there are actual serious or melodramatic moments, it does not feel any different from the moments when the characters are just sitting around having tea.
While Blake is excellent at building tension, she is really bad at executing it. The reader is on the edge of their seat the whole time just waiting for the pin to drop, but it leads to nothing. What is supposed to be the climax, the other main five characters finding Libby dead, is quickly found out to be false. In truth, Libby was actually just taken to another plane of reality, while an illusion was left in her place. The big reveal is that Ezra, Libby’s boyfriend, and Atlas, the caretaker, are working together to take down the Alexandrian Society. Back in time, Ezra and Atlas were both selected to go through the trials together and, when their group discovered that they had to kill someone off, Atlas was elected to kill Ezra. Instead, Ezra (who can basically travel through different planes of reality and time) and Atlas formed a plan where Atlas would become caretaker and Ezra would go forward in time ten years to the next batch of recruitments so they could carry out this mysterious plan. However, this whole book basically just led up to an info dump where the main characters were not even involved. That is not good writing.
To give the book credit, it brought up some interesting conversations. Throughout the novel, one subject that was brought up a lot was the concept of knowledge and whether or not the Alexandrian Society was justified in hiding all of these ground-breaking discoveries from the public. The main enemy of the society is The Forum, cleverly named after the Roman Forum, which is trying to take control of the library and open it to the public. Meanwhile, the Alexandrian Society wants to keep it a secret because they believe knowledge is power and that much knowledge could be misused if it fell into the hands of the general public. This is a bit funny, considering they do a human sacrifice every ten years and run a twisted little game show that would absolutely give all recruited members PTSD. Maybe this is another situation that is brought up in the second book since it is part of the overarching plot, but it seems like the general consensus among the main six is that the Alexandrian Society is in the right. Got to say, that is a hot take. It feels almost aristocratic to have this elite society of people who are super smart and have magical powers gatekeeping the basic right of knowledge. Supposedly, there is a council that specially selects the recruits, which makes it feel even weirder, like it is just five people that are determining who is worthy enough to join their creepy high-class group. So while this book brings up interesting conversations, it is questionable whether or not Blake is on the side of elitism or not. As the iconic The Book Leo said in reference to these intelligent type books, a good dark academia book critiques dark academia.
Image of an Aristocrat by Look and Learn
The Atlas Six is supposed to be a super smart book, which can completely lose the readers. Blake is literally trying to scientifically explain how thermal dynamics can lead to time travel and how objects that are frozen work within the planes of the universe and Lord none of this makes sense and she has been going on for pages. So Blake can describe how time travel works, yet, when the characters use their powers, it just sounds like ‘and so the particles bend to my will and they change and this happens.’ It feels like Blake did enough research to construct a general theory but, when it comes to the characters actually using their powers to make it happen, she gets lost on the whole chemistry and molecular level of it all. Of course, authors do not need to get a chemistry degree just to write their book, but Blake was the one who decided to go super in-depth with how time travel would work so, if she was going all in, then she should have gone all in. In the current state of the book, it reads like Libby rambling for pages explaining thermal whatever to Nico then having a sentence like, ‘then they used their super special powers and did that.’ Overall, the writing when it came to the combat and characters using their powers felt really weak.
Image of Goodreads logo by Jurgen Appelo on Flickr
Currently, The Atlas Six has 3.64 stars on Goodreads, which is not bad at all. There were plenty of people who really loved this book, but Sofia summed it up best, “The Atlas Six is pretentious and luxurious and self-indulgent. I can’t decide if I love it or if I would rather throw it across the room. Somehow I read 380-something pages of this book and I still have no idea what it’s about.” Reading through the reviews, it seems like there are two groups of people who loved it and a group that did not. There were the people who loved it for all of its trashiness, love geometry, and intellectualism while knowing it is a trashy book and the people who think it is a literary masterpiece and write phrases like “lethally smart” and “torturously delicious” in their review, like Chloe Gong, author of These Violent Delights. Meanwhile, most of the people who did not enjoy it felt like it was too confusing, had obnoxious characters, and that the writing was too pretentious. Sounds familiar.
No matter how cool the “Beginning” chapter sounds, do not let the Library of Alexandria intrigue you! It is not going to be as good as it sounds. When there is a loose plot, books rely on good characters to hold it up, but The Atlas Six is weak in both of these areas. Its tone, pacing, and writing style are also weak, so what does this book really contribute to the vast library of YA novels? The answer is– Not much.
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